Lecture Previews

Dennis Howard will present a lecture titled “Music like dirt rasta! Genre defiance and bonding in the Kingston Creative Echo Chamber,” which will discuss genre developments in the Kingston music environment. Howard is one of Jamaica’s most distinguished musicologists and hopes that this lecture will be a way to better inform journalists and scholars of the genres of Jamaican music.

Howard works as a part-time lecturer in the Institute of Caribbean Studies at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica. He works specifically with students in the Entertainment and Cultural Enterprise Management program. Howard’s publications include articles in the Jamaica Journal, the Caribbean Quarterly, and two chapters of a book on Jamaican popular music.

The lecture aims to create a climate, culture, and community that will enable talent and ideas to grow in the Pittsburgh region. It will focus on advances in the computer science field and innovative technologies.

The Center for International Relations and Politics and Heinz College present Moataz Fattah, who will lecture on “The Winds of Political Change in Egypt and the Arab World.”

Fattah is an associate professor of political science at Cairo University in Egypt and Central Michigan University. He is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., and a fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding.

Fattah has 40 academic publications in both Arabic and English about the political, economic, and cultural aspects of the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy toward the region. His most notable English book is Democratic Values in the Muslim World. Fattah writes daily for the Egyptian newspaper El-Shorouk, and he is also a frequent commentator and analyst for BBC Arabic, BBC International, Al-Jazeera Arabic, and Al-Jazeera English.

Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar: Rochel Gelman

Thursday at 4:30 p.m.

Porter Hall 100 (Gregg Hall)

This talk, titled “Early Cognitive Development and Beyond,” will center on new research which reveals that infants and preschoolers have more advanced knowledge of math and science than previously thought. Despite this fact, older students struggle to master material in these disciplines.

Gelman is the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers and a professor of psychology. She has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work to prove that preschoolers and infants were more advanced than traditionally assumed has received many honors, including membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.